The present disclosure relates to a mobile operating environment, and more particularly, to providing improved apparatus and methods of distributing integrated mobile applications for user devices.
Mobile operators or mobile device carriers play a major part in the telecommunication industry today. Initially, mobile operators concentrated their efforts on generating revenue by increasing their subscriber base. However, it will be appreciated that in several countries, the scope for increasing the subscriber base has now become very limited, as the market has reached close to the saturation point. As a result, the mobile operators have been branching into providing value added services to subscribers in order to increase their revenue.
One way of generating increased revenue is through the sales of premium services, such as ringtones, wallpaper, games, etc., to users. These services may be provided by the mobile operator themselves, or by business entities who may operate in collaboration with the mobile operators to provide such services. The services may be available for download to a mobile device or user equipment upon payment of a fee.
Many benefits, such as maximizing the potential earnings for sales, accrue upon recommending and promoting to users content or services that are the most likely to be of interest to the users. The users can have a better experience using their mobile device in light of these individually recommended content and services.
A burgeoning area of such content and services pertains to applications. For example, an on-device mobile application store has become a crowded, hard-to-browse experience as more and more applications come online. Similarly, given the general user interface limitations of most mobile computing platforms, applications that are installed can have functionality that can only be used one at a time. Each application generally runs standalone. Conventionally, mobile platforms in some instances allow for the sharing of data (e.g., contact details) across the mobile platform. That functionality does not extend, however, to the sharing of full, custom user interface (UI) extensions between third party and core applications.